


pathology of a good man

by sevenfoxes



Category: Lucky Number Slevin (2006)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-02
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-14 09:09:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1260841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenfoxes/pseuds/sevenfoxes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>About a year into it, he finally asks her.</p><p>Absolutely nothing precipitates it.  She's patched up bullet wounds, scrambled to pack her shit half-asleep at four in the morning because they're <i>not safe</i>, washed clothes soaked in blood that belongs to neither of them.  But it's a sunny morning in Oregon, eating eggs and toast in the small kitchen of their house when he asks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pathology of a good man

**Author's Note:**

> This is for [inthesunlight](http://inthesunlight.tumblr.com), who asked for Lucky Number Slevin for her birthday like TWO YEARS AGO.

Mr. Goodkat doesn't kill her.

Instead, he stares at her over Slevin's shoulder, his dark eyes picking her apart. Lindsey can imagine the things rolling through his head, the ways that he could get at her, even though Slevin's put his body between them, that he would probably fight Goodkat if he tried to reach beyond Slevin and snap her neck.

Or cut her throat.

Or shoot her. Like he did in the morgue, this time bullets meeting flesh instead of kevlar. (And oh god, she remembers the feeling of those shots, how sharp the pain was, how it felt like taking a train to the chest, how if she were to peel back her top right now, she'd be able to see the fields of red and purple across her skin.)

But he doesn't kill her. There's a moment something shifts in his eyes, where the look he had given her in the morgue before he shot her is gone, and is instead replaced with something strangely kind. Something like mercy.

Like a father.

("We still need to go," Slevin tells her a few minutes after Goodkat disappears into the crowd at the station. He is close enough to her, his body pressed up against her, that she's sure he can feel the race of her heart that is still lingering after their discovery.

"I don't understand," Lindsey says, looking up at him. God, he's tall.

Slevin touches her face again, and she knows it comes from a good place, but it makes her feel like he is trying to calm a spooking horse. Like there's something she needs to fear. And the worst part is that she knows that there is, that she should be afraid of the fingers ghosting over her cheeks.

"I used my real name on this job," he tells her. "There's others. They'll come looking."

(Others. Somehow she knows it's not The Boss's or The Rabbi's men. How easy it was to wrap herself in the romantic notion of revenge, to forget that the man she's entangled with, the man she's let inside of her, is a killer. A hitman.)

She doesn't ask him why he used his real name on this job. She already knows the answer.

Later, as they hit the Vermont border, she'll think about it, linger on the way he said we, even though there was no longer a need for _her_ to run.)

 

\--

 

Lindsey is used to dead bodies.

("Ugh, Li Mei, _four years_ of medical school and you are cutting up dead bodies for a living!" her mother would sigh at every family occasion until Lichia dropped out of law school to become a tattoo artist, and Lindsey officially handed over the title of black sheep to her younger sister.)

She loved the quiet of her morgue, in the peace to be found on the other side of life. She loved the mysteries that came across her table every day, being able to bring closure to families, rest to those who had died.

Chicago in the winter reminds her of the morgue. It's the first city that she and Slevin actually settle in. It's been months of skipping between cities, Slevin taking the jobs she knows Goodkat is funnelling to him. Lindsey makes a conscious choice to stay out of it, to not ask questions, which is, frankly, extraordinarily difficult for her. She yearns to pepper him with questions, but doesn't because she knows that he'll tell her the truth.

He'll tell her because he's a good man. He's a good man who does bad things.

And she's not sure she can live with that. But worst is this: she's not sure she can live without _him._

They get a apartment in The Loop that is a hell of a lot nicer than the apartment she had in New York City. She doesn't want to know how much the rent is. Money is one of the very few awkward and tense issues between them; they've been moving too much for her to get any sort of solid work, though he insists she doesn't need to. Which is only accurate in the sense that he seems to have _a lot_ of money. But mostly extremely inaccurate in the sense that Lindsey is bored out of her fucking skull and has never been a kept woman and certainly doesn't intend to be.

"Why a coroner?" he asks one night, his head pillowed on her stomach as they lie tangled in bed. "Seems like a perfectly good waste of a medical degree."

In that moment, she thinks of her mother. She hasn't spoken to her in a little over three months; it had been one short phone call when they had stopped in Massachusetts, just to avoid the missing person's report. _Finding herself_ , she had told her mother. Years ago, it would have been a three hour argument, but her mother had begun suspecting her younger (and _perfect_ ) brother of smoking weed and had bigger battles to fight, so it was a loud sigh, a grumble and a promise to call and to come home for Chinese new year.

Slevin reads the silence wrong and stutters for a second. "No offense."

Lindsey shrugs. She's not offended, though it bugs her sometimes that people write off what coroners do, like finding out how or why people's bodies fail is somehow less noble that being a doctor or a detective, instead of it being a delicate balance of the two. "Truth be told, I never really wanted to be a doctor. It's what my father was set on and I spent most of my early twenties desperately trying to please him - unsuccessfully, I might add. I always wanted to be a detective, like Columbo or Sherlock."

He smiles against her collarbone, his hand slipping up her thigh slowly. "You'd be a fucking fantastic detective."

"Damn right."

(Ironically, she ends up working at the free women's clinic downtown and absolutely _loves_ it.)

 

\--

 

In New Orleans, one of Slevin's jobs goes bad. Very bad.

3am finds Lindsey in the bathroom, her hands covered in Slevin's blood. He's taken two bullets to the shoulder. Both are flesh wounds, but the bleeds are bad, and only one of the shots was a through n' through, so she's forced to spend the better part of twenty minutes fishing in the second wound for the bullet.

He doesn't let her give him anything for the pain as she sews up what looks like a very bad knife wound ( _axe_ , he tells her later, more than a little out of it) under his ribs, but the ragged, horrific sound he makes when she presses into the bruised flesh near his hips pushes her over the edge.

"No," he says as she fills the syringe with morphine. "I need a clear head."

"No," she parrots back, "you need some rest and you're not going to sleep amped up on pain. So shut up and take it like a big boy."

The edge of his mouth quirks up. She's always been outspoken, never quite cared about looking foolish, but the time with Slevin has changed her - she's more sure of herself now, less willing to sway under pressure, more forceful. He's always encouraging her bossy streak.

Slevin wipes his bloody hands on his jean-clad thighs before he picks up his glock form the counter. She tries not to look at the gun as she slips the needle out from under his skin. "I don't think I was followed, but just in case." He slides out the magazine, shows it to her and slides it back in, chambering the first round. "It's got a strong kick, but it's point and shoot. Don't hesitate, don't blink, because they won't."

He slips the gun into her hand and the metal is warm. It's heavier than it looks.

No. She just… no.

"I don't know how to shoot," Lindsey says, laying the gun down on the ground by the wastebasket filled with bloody bandages.

The look he levels her is strange, like he's only just realizing now what she is. That she's not Goodkat, that she's not a part of that world with him. Frankly, that is completely fucking useless at it, even if she had the desire. (She doesn't.)

Wrangling him into bed is difficult. He's significantly bigger than she is and has put on more muscle in the last few months; she barely makes it to the bed with him, using an arm around his waist to steer what little power he has remaining.

She goes back into the bathroom to retrieve the gun, placing it on the nightstand beside his father's watch.

(Later, the drugs make him so loopy that he cries, though she suspects it's not totally drug-induced. He cries hard, his body wracked with sobs as she holds him. He's by no means a closed-off man or unemotional, but it's the only time she's ever seen him cry.

In the morning, he smiles as she hands him a glass of apple juice and says nothing.)

 

\--

 

About a year into it, he finally asks her.

Absolutely nothing precipitates it. She's patched up bullet wounds, scrambled to pack her shit half-asleep at four in the morning because they're _not safe_ , washed clothes soaked in blood that belongs to neither of them. But it's a sunny morning in Oregon, eating eggs and toast in the small kitchen of their house when he asks.

"Does it bug you?" he says, his eyebrows drawn together. The first question is asked with his eyes levelled out the window, into the forest beside the house. The second one comes with his eyes directly on her. "What I do. Does it bug you?"

This is a conversation that feels too heavy for seven in the morning, and she'd say _no_ if she thought he'd believe it, but he's gotten surprisingly good at reading her tells.

"It used to," she tells him. "I don't know. I try not to think about it." There's no hurt or judgement on his face as she speaks; what has always struck her as most peculiar about Slevin is that he's never felt the need to own her feelings, that he allows her to think and feel whatever she wants, even if logically, she knows that it must be hurtful for him.

She thinks it might be what she loves most about Slevin: he loves her for who she is, for whatever she feels. That he accepts her, even when that acceptance must come at a cost for him.

(And she bears the cost of his choices in return.)

"I know you're a good man. I know you don't hurt good people." Lindsey can't meet his eyes, so she stares at his long fingers wrapped around the coffee cup in front of her. Thinks about how many triggers those fingers have pulled, how often those same fingers have been inside of her, and find that she _does not care_. She doesn't know what kind of woman - what kind of person - that makes her. "But I know distinctions like that are so murky. Is it still okay? I don't know." She pokes her fork at eggs that she suddenly has no desire to eat. "But I remember what it felt like back in New York, all those bodies on the slab. Women, kids… people who died _horribly_. I could find out what happened to them, how those they died, what kind of pain they'd been in before they finally found peace, and the cases would just sit unsolved. There were times where I wished I could just…"

She sighs heavily, and tries to smile, but it comes out abortive and wrong, her face merely twitching. Slevin leans forward and wraps those fingers around her wrist, searching like he's looking for her pulse. His face is so open, so vulnerable and she just _does not understand_ how a man like him can swing like a pendulum along such a stark dichotomy. She's seen the casualties of his war, seen what his mind and his hands can do to others. She knows what his childhood was, the gravity of his loss. And yet the man in front of her, when not holding a gun or a knife, is the kindest, sweetest man she has ever known. Her heart is so tender for him that it unsettles her to a profound degree.

His eyes snap up to hers when she grabs his fingers, curling her hands around them. Trapping them.

"Does it bug you?" she asks.

He doesn't answer.

\--

"I love you," he tells her as he fucks her.

He's not the sentimental type, the kind that coos over babies or makes grand, romantic gestures. He doesn't really cry much as far as she's seen, but he'll tell her personal things, vulnerable, emotional things that past boyfriends would have sooner sliced off limbs than admit.

(He tells her that he always thinks about his mother when he smells fresh bread because he remembers loving her fresh olive loaf more than life itself. He tells her that his mother called him Heddy and his father called him Kiddo and no one has called him Henry since his parents were murdered and that he doesn't miss it, not one bit. He tells her that Goodkat called him "kid" until he was old enough to pick his own name. He tells her that he never wants to have children, that he has nightmares of fate repeating itself, of leaving a child alone in this world, and the thought is more than he can bear.)

Sex is always interesting with Slevin. Some nights it's soft and sweet, the sort of tender sex that he likes to call _making love_ even though the saccharine terms makes her mouth twist and her eyes roll. Other nights it's harder. Other nights he holds her wrists down as he moves inside her, tells her roughly in her ear all the things he thinks about doing to her. And god, the things we wants to do to her… they make her want to _beg_. And he tells her that's fine as he holds her down and hikes her leg up over his shoulder so high that the angle makes her choke with pleasure, that he wants to hear her beg.

"I love you," he tells her as he fucks her. Every time. Hard or soft, desperate or lazy. And she believes it. Slevin never says anything to her that he doesn't mean, brutally honest in the same way she is.

She doesn't say it back.

He never asks her to.

 

\--

 

Slevin only truly frightens her once.

(Lindsey wasn't lying about him being a good man. It's why it was so easy to fall for him when he was pretending to be Nick's friend, why she's in love with him now but can't seem to find it in herself to verbalize. The Slevin in New York wasn't really an act; she's surprised at how much he is the man that she met looking for a cup of sugar.)

In Los Angeles, one of his clients finds her alone in their rented apartment.

The client nor his men hurt her; they don't even tie her up. Instead, they make her sit in the comfy wingback chair that had made her fall in love with the little furnished apartment above a linen store. They make her sit and wait for Slevin to come home, a man on either side of her, the client sitting in matching chair closer to the southern window.

("Do you know what your little boyfriend does for me, sweetheart?" he asks while they wait.)

The second Slevin walks in the door, Lindsey knows how this is going to end. They didn't need to hurt her, didn't need to tie her up to get the message across that this a threat meant for him, a threat against her. And while Slevin will put up with the former, the latter…

She's never - _never_ \- seen him look like that before.

(By the end of it, her throat and chest are sprayed with the blood of two men, and she's heard the sound a man makes taking bullets to the kneecaps, and it takes fifty miles in the car for her to have a full blown breakdown.

Slevin pulls over on the deserted road when she tries to open the car door while it's going sixty, racing over to her side of the car as she literally tumbles out into the blowing dust, her lungs refusing to fill with air. He lets her hit him as she cries, the tacky blood leaving faint pink lines on the collar of his shirt and neck, his arm locking her against him.)

 

\--

 

In the fall, Slevin gets a call.

"I need to go home," he tells her.

Home turns out to be Kansas of all places. A small farmhouse a couple miles outside of Russell, near Wilson Lake.

It is the most innocuous-looking house Lindsey has ever seen, a house straight out of a Terrance Malik movie, quaint and quiet, where a wholesome family of four plus golden retriever might live. There are corn fields, for god's sake.

Instead, it is the house of Goodkat. The house where Slevin grew up, where he learned how to kill from his second father, the father that he remembers more clearly than the first.

They find him in bed, his face pale and gaunt. Pancreatic cancer. The look of betrayal on Slevin's face makes Lindsey's heart hurt. He looks so young when he's vulnerable, like a child searching for comfort, for safety.

Outside his room, they speak to one another in whispers.

"I need you to help him," Slevin says.

"Did you know he was sick?"

"No," Slevin says, then sighs and runs his hand over his face. "I mean, he was giving me all his commissions, so I knew something was up, but I didn't have any idea…"

Lindsey has no idea how to tell him this, would trade anything in the world to give him a different answer, to make this okay for him.

"I can make him comfortable," Lindsey says. "But he's dying."

Slevin nods, then turns away from her, his face tight.

 

\--

 

Slevin heads off for supplies while Lindsey changes Goodkat's sheets. She helps lower him into the bed and he doesn't put up a fight. She's not quite sure why that frightens her, but it does. Men like Goodkat and Slevin don't accept help unless they direly need it, a characteristic that Lindsey has found generally annoying in Slevin's case.

Goodkat considers her for a moment as she generally fusses over the room, unsure of what to do with the quiet.

"He's different with you," Goodkat tells her. Even in this weakened state, he's still as intimidating as the man he was the afternoon he shot her, the man in the bus terminal who could have easily killed her. But Lindsey is a different woman; she is no longer afraid of him.

(And even if she didn't feel secure inside herself, she's beginning to understand just how safe Slevin makes her feel. Protected in a way she's never felt in her life.)

"Not really," Lindsey says, cleaning off his bedside table, stacking the empty water glasses that cover most of the surface.

"No," Goodkat says. "He's a man." His breathing is measured, shaky with pain. She recognizes it immediately. It's funny how much Slevin takes after Goodkat, all the coping mechanisms they share. But there's a definite fork at their personality, Slevin sweet and open where Goodkat is closed and distant. She briefly wonders how a man like Goodkat could raise a man like Slevin, how Slevin isn't bitter and closed off, unable to show affection.

(It's love, she realizes. Slevin has never lodged a single complaint about his childhood with Goodkat, and watching the men together, she's seen the love Goodkat has for Slevin, and Slevin for Goodkat in return. He's more of a father to Slevin than Lindsey's father ever was to her.)

"He's a good man," Lindsey says.

"Yes," Goodkat agrees. "He is."

The look he gives is as close to approving as she thinks she'll ever get.

(Later, Slevin returns with two huge bags with CEDAR VALLEY REGIONAL HOSPITAL written on the side, filled to the brim with supplies and vials. Lindsey doesn't ask a single questions as she roots through the packs, pulling out morphine and hydromorphone.)

 

\--

 

Goodkat dies three days later.

(It is only the second time Lindsey has seen Slevin cry. It's quiet this time, private. Not for her. She leaves him with his grief and he seems grateful for it.

When they've cleared out all the things of Goodkat's that Slevin wants to keep, he sets the house on fire. It takes twenty minutes for the flames to reach Goodkat's bedroom, the house erupting as a funeral pyre in the night.

They watch it together, Slevin's fingers curling gently against hers, slipping in between her knuckles.

They drive away in Goodkat's ancient Oldsmobile until Kansas is another memory.)


End file.
